Ted Leinhart
speaker
251 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Ted Leinhart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Read by Ted Leinhart.
in this world's fair year we may be forgiven an excess of national self-consciousness which leads us to ask where we stand among the peoples of the earth to cast about for the significance of this young cis-atlantic civilization
the answer is writ large over the length and breadth of the continent in our huge railway systems containing more than half the track mileage of the entire world in the telegraph lines beside them in the network of wires over and under our great cities in the transoceanic cables with which a quarter of a century ago we brought the old world within speaking distance of the new
and in the strange machines telephones phonographs dynamos which have revolutionized our industries and which will certainly revolutionize our whole society in short we are a nation of mechanics and inventors this will clearly be our meaning to the historical students of a thousand years hence as we say to-day that greece bequeathed art to the world and rome's heritage was law
an age of electricity in edison is its profit but half a century ago one might have felt secure in asserting that the great engineering triumphs of the age had come through the application of steam and now already the more subtle agency of electricity has thrown the work of watt and stevenson and fulton from the category of marvels and bids fair to supersede it altogether
steam came but to prepare the way for the ever present all-powerful fluid and we are being ushered into an age of electricity curiously enough there is among us an unassuming citizen who sums up in his personality and achievements this genius of the race
who is one might almost say to america what caesar was to rome if one were to ask what individual best symbolized this industrial regeneration for which we as a nation will stand it would be marvellously easy to answer
thomas alva edison the precocious self-reliance and restless energy of the new world its brilliant defiance of traditions the immediate adaptation of means to ends and above all the distinctive inventive faculty reached in him their apogee
the mere mass of this extraordinary man's work gives in itself a striking idea of the force which he exerts in our material progress up to a few days ago the government had granted edison no less than seven hundred and twenty patents while he had in addition one hundred and fifty applications on file
and this during a working period that has not yet brought him within many years of the grand climacteric and much of it accomplished in the face of discouraging financial obstacles the boyhood of a genius for mr edison is but forty-six years of age he comes of dutch parentage the family having emigrated to america in seventeen thirty his great-grandfather was a banker of high standing in new york
thomas edison was born in erie county ohio when he was but a child of seven the family fortunes suffered reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age and that the family should move from his birthplace to michigan
only four years later the boy was reading newton's principia with the entirely logical result of becoming deeply and permanently disgusted with pure mathematics indeed he seems to have displayed all the due precocity of genius one of his notable feats about this time being an attempt to read through the entire free library of detroit
newsboy editor and chemist at fifteen nor was he by any means a youthful bookworm and dreamer the distinctly practical bent of his character was shown in his operations as newsboy on the grand trunk railway especially in the brilliant coup by which in eighteen sixty nine he bought up on futures a thousand copies of the detroit free press containing important war news
and gaining a little time on his rivals sold the entire batch like hot cakes so that the price reached twenty-five cents a paper before the end of his route it was at this period too that he was posing as editor of the grand trunk herald a weekly periodical of very modest proportions issued from the train on which he travelled
he had also begun to dabble in chemistry and fitted up to that end a small itinerant laboratory during the progress of some occult experiments in this workshop certain complications ensued in which a jolted and broken bottle of sulphuric acid attracted the attention of the conductor
he who had been long suffering in the matter of unearthly odours promptly ejected the young devotee and all his works this incident would have been only amusing had it not been rendered deplorable from the lasting deafness which resulted from a box on the ear administered by the irate conductor in the course of the young scientist
edison transferred the laboratory to his father's cellar and diligently studied telegraphy establishing a line between his home and a boy partner's with the help of an old river cable sundry links of stove-pipe wire and glass bottle insulators a heroic tuition
dramatic situations appear at every turn of this man's life though temperamentally he would be the last to seek them he seems to be continually arriving on the scene at critical moments to take the conduct of affairs into his own hands
it was on one of these occasions when he snatched a station-master's child from before an approaching train that he earned his first lessons in telegraphy from the father so apt a pupil was he that the railroad company soon gave him regular employment and at seventeen he had become one of the most expert operators on the road
Showing 81–100 of 251 · page 5 of 13
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